True to its motto of “connecting everything” Broadcom (News - Alert) is demonstrating a suite of solutions that integrate all kinds of wireless and wired consumer devices to create a seamless, full featured connected home, with a product called “Connected Home.” Whole home connectivity isn’t a new idea, of course. Home networks and connected consumer devices have been promoted and promised by vendors for more than a decade. However, the complexity of installation and challenges of integrating different network protocols – to say nothing of a home automation price tag (News - Alert) that could tally tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars—have kept the majority of consumer households on the sidelines. Most of us are still juggling home entertainment cables and connectors and separate wireless and wired computer, printer and Internet connections. 

To find out how Broadcom solves that complexity challenge, and how it enables consumers to enjoy the benefits of a fully Connected Home while avoiding the headaches, I spoke to Fred Taylor, senior marketing manager in Broadcom’s Broadband Communications Group.

Mary Cronin (News - Alert): Let’s start with Broadcom’s approach to creating your Connected Home solution. What’s new about the features you are demonstrating this year?

Fred Taylor: Given how fast this industry keeps moving, we are making new announcements and bringing new features to the market every day. But Connected Home leverages the enormous installed base of Broadcom solutions that are already in the home – and in the hand of consumers. Broadcom chips are already embedded in so much of the networking, electronics and connectivity infrastructure in the home, as well as in wireless and mobile devices. All of these devices make home connectivity a reality.

What’s most exciting is that these connected consumer devices are really starting to manage discovery right out of the box and start talking to each other. So a smartphone can serve as a powerful remote control for consumer entertainment, and a connected TV can play video that comes from the home computer, or a tablet, or a phone. That’s a breakthrough in terms of liberating media and making it available to consumers anywhere in the home and even outside the home.

Mary Cronin:  Sounds like the type of home entertainment system and network that used to be expensive and time-consuming to set up. What makes it easier in Broadcom’s Connected Home model?

Fred Taylor: There’s been a history of printers and electronics and other devices that all have their own special network requirements and protocols along with dedicated switches and routers and hubs; all of which made connectivity a lot more complex in the past. But today these same boxes and devices are coming with DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) support, making each new component and device discoverable right out of the box. Plug in a new component and it starts to announce itself and look around to see what else it can communicate with in the vicinity. 

What’s even better is that the configuration process happens in the background – and when the devices discover each other and start communicating, the consumer sees a “connected home “menu that adds the new device automatically to the existing controller. So instead of the consumer having to start from scratch to register and configure every separate device onto the home network, the devices can and will do a lot of that set-up work on their own. The consumer doesn’t have to know about the details of the home networking infrastructure because as soon as they enable one Connected Home process they will see that other devices are already on-board. There’s an automatic discovery of embedded connectivity and control features that are waiting and ready to be put to use. With touchscreens, easy to use smartphones, tablets and dedicated controllers, the on-screen menus can simply walk consumers through all their new options, whereas before the user had to know a lot of the details and follow more complicated instructions.

You don’t even have to download specific vendor software anymore – a new smart product comes automatically configured to recognize other networked devices.

Mary Cronin: How long will it take for consumers to begin to see the full benefits of the Connected Home?

Fred Taylor: The adoption and availability of this technology is evolving naturally as more people realize that their connected devices can already talk to each other. I think of the process as the Netflix effect. Now we are seeing a lot of connected-TVs and Blu-ray players shipping with Netflix, YouTube, Pandora (News - Alert), Rhapsody or some other form of online access capability. So, using Netflix as an example, instead of buying and setting up a separate Netflix device, that feature is available anytime the consumer wants to use it throughout the home. But, the key is, that to take advantage of Netflix features from anywhere in the home, consumers must hook their devices to a home network. And, in hooking up the device to the home network, that connected device with the help of new features such as DLNA will automatically discover and be discovered by other connected devices in the home attached to the same network.

Mary Cronin: Once the discovery and set up is done, can you give me some examples of how consumers will use these new connections?

Fred Taylor: Personally, I’m seeing a lot of the benefits in my own house. Like many consumers, I have accumulated terabytes of digital content from recording home videos and an enormous number of photos, plus I have purchased all kinds of media and entertainment content for myself and my family. It’s terrific to be able to find whatever I want accessible on a network connected NAS drive instead of searching every computer or media player for a specific file or disk or physical object. And not only can I always find the content that I want, now I can make it available on a TV screen, a laptop, a tablet, or a desktop computer in any part of the house where family members want to gather. Since the connected devices can talk laterally across the network, you don’t have to physically transfer the original data file thus minimizing time and consumption of bandwidth to move home media back and forth to a specific device. 

Mary Cronin: To wrap up, can you comment on what’s coming next? Will there be even more advances in the Connected Home features?

Fred Taylor:  Broadcom has already done a lot of the development that will be required to enable new features that vendors and service providers can implement based on their individual business models. And today, Broadcom chips can actually do even more than vendors may make available to the consumer. That helps our customers develop their own products faster and helps them to keep up with new features and formats and apps as market demand grows. For example, mobile, tablets and TVs all come in 3 different resolutions and content will be transcoded to the device that you will want to play it on. The system will know the format each device is going to require and transcoding will be automatic as a consumer choice, including 3D content. It only takes one successful early mover in the market to drive demand for new features and to convince vendors to surface existing capabilities of their devices. 

What gets me most excited is that consumers are able to do so much with the technology and the media content that’s already in their homes.. Connected Home features are built into a vast number of consumer devices today. While Broadcom is primarily industry facing and not a consumer brand, we are helping to demonstrate to consumers how easily they can do even more with their smart devices.

Fred Taylor will be a speaker at the SPEC Conference in Los Angeles on Oct. 6, 2010.